Five Things You Need to Know About the Electoral College

Insta Post_ Five Things _ Electoral College.png

Topics Discussed:

  1. The Electoral College resulted from compromises among members of the Constitutional Congress.

  2. The Electoral College has persistently advantaged less populous areas over more populous areas.

  3. Most of the way the Electoral College operates is determined by federal and state laws -- not the Constitution.

  4. State laws and Supreme Court decisions have bound electors to their state's popular vote.

  5. We have a long history of trying to improve this system.

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Episode Resources

Transcript

Beth: [00:00:00] I think it's really frustrating to see conversations unfold, where people accuse one another of denying history, either because of the minimization of the role that the institution of slavery played, or the focus on that role. It's just both. And you can't understand this well without understanding how slavery impacted the decisions that they made.

Sarah: [00:00:24] This is Sarah 

Beth: [00:00:25] and Beth. 

Sarah: [00:00:25] You're listening to Pantsuit Politics, 

Beth: [00:00:27] the home of grace filled political conversations.

Sarah: [00:00:46] Hello everyone. Welcome to another episode of Pantsuit Politics. We are thrilled to be here with you today and before we deep dive into five things you need to know about the electoral college, we wanted to say, thank you so much for the rating and reviews on iTunes. Please keep them coming. And we wanted to share one with you because they've been so delightful to read.

Jess wrote a little bit. I guess that's like a low poem she wrote, "Pantsuit Politics. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Your rundown of the news gives the benefit of the doubt and critiques multiple perspectives. You allow me to practice my nuance skills, not just with politics, but in any area of my life with conflict, you help me identify when someone's views is so black and white and how that often comes from a place of fear.

You show me that I'm still a work in progress and that's okay. You give me hope that I might be able to address family members someday by sharing stories of people who have. There are more ways, but I just want to say thank you. I love your work. Please make sure you take your time to give yourselves a break from the awful stuff, because I need you both for the long haul. Please let me know if I can help." 

I mean, I just feel like other people podcasts reviews don't include offers to help. Why are people so lovely? 

Beth: [00:01:50] Jess. Thank you so much. And thank you to all of you who have left ratings and reviews. It really means a lot to us. We also want to share that if you'd like to know things about us that you haven't heard us share, which I recognize is a limited list.

We're pretty transparent. Here we are planning and ask us anything episode sometime near the end of the year, just to kind of give us all a break in a reset in some levity. And so you can send questions for ask us anything to hello@PantsuitPoliticsShow.com and we are looking forward to seeing what's on your mind.

Sarah: [00:02:20] So before we dive into our five things, we do want to take a moment to acknowledge that the spread of COVID-19 is dramatically accelerating across the country, including in our own communities. I was just telling Beth that I got a rapid test on Tuesday out of an abundance of caution and arguably paranoia.

And as I sat in the parking lot of the pharmacy getting the rapid tests, I watched at least three people around me received positive diagnosis, including the woman in the car next to me. It was really intense to just kind of watch it unfold in real time. And I feel like I'm getting text messages and messages like every 15 minutes. Well, this person's positive, this person's positive. I mean, it is just spreading like wildfire. 

Beth: [00:03:05] We are living what we tried to avoid in March. That's what I keep thinking. We, this was so present in everyone's minds in March because we feared this scenario that's playing out now. And I'm glad that we bought some time.

Again, all of that work mattered in March. This is a really dangerous time. And it's, I read a tweet today that said something like this is a bad movie plot for us to go, went through all these COVID deaths, right as a vaccine is starting to look more possible. It is such a mistake for us to let up our guard now, when it does feel like we can at least see a finish line here. Not a really black and white one, but. 

Sarah: [00:03:48] I love Dr. Fauchi's language that the Calvary is coming. I thought that was lovely. 

Beth: [00:03:52] So just continued encouragement to be diligent about this and solidarity with you all who are having differences of opinion with your family members about Thanksgiving in particular. We put some tips on our Instagram page this morning on Thursday, about how you might have conversations that are grace-filled with people who disagree with you on taking precautions.

But ultimately the bottom line is we all have to assess risk for ourselves and we have to release how other people are assessing risks and just apply that positive social pressure of setting a good example, because this is a really scary time.

Sarah: [00:04:31] And what I've realized is. You know, in my own life, two things, one, even if I decide the risk, isn't there for our family. And perhaps we could, you know, attend that event or do what, you know, host people over on the outside deck or whatever. It's like, it's not even worth the anxiety at this point. You know, even if your risk is low, I feel like the anxiety because, you know, it's so widespread is really, really high. And I told my husband, I'm like, you know, the anxiety is screaming so loud.

It's like, I have to remind myself the same rules for how it spreads still apply. But it, you know, I'm feeling myself like creeping back into that mindset of like, Don't touch your food when it comes in the house, you know, like sort of the, the really intense places we were in, in March. And I'm like, no, the rules about how COVID spread are still the same.

Now there might be more people out there spreading it without a doubt, but I'm trying to walk this line of like acknowledging the fear as it spreads more widely. And like just letting that be what it is and not try to both talk myself into things that aren't worth it and talk myself out of things out of paranoia.

It's really, I mean, listen, it's just. It's hard out there right now, psychologically, much less everything else. 

Beth: [00:05:42] That sense of how do I be diligent and grounded at the same time is an excellent segue to the electoral college and the election that we're living through. Don't you think? 

Sarah: [00:05:54] So we want to walk you through the basics of the electoral college.

The first thing we're going to talk about is the early history and the ways in which the electoral college resulted from real horrific compromises among members of the constitutional Congress. So let's go all the way back to that second constitutional convention, because remember they had the first one and they got the articles of Confederacy and it was a hot mess.

So they tried again and there were multiple proposals and months of debate about how Congress should elect the president or should citizens directly elect the president. And there was this really intense thread throughout much of the founding fathers writings, that there was concern about the masses.

You know, we talked about this in our discussion with the Federalist papers in the, how to be a citizen series, that they really did, they were sort of worried about the tyranny of the majority. They were, they really believed in educated elites, making a lot of the decisions and you see those threads run throughout their conversations and their compromises surrounding the election of president.

Beth: [00:07:02] And so the electoral college was this compromise that seemed to get at a bunch of different concerns expressed by the framers. You had the representation of States. You had a group of elite's still there to buffer the masses and you have Congress, which they really wanted to give so much power to ending up with the possibility of a decisive vote.

So you had a compromise in terms of the format. And then the next task was figuring out how to allocate electors and congressional representatives among the States. And this is where we get to the really horrific compromise, 

Sarah: [00:07:40] because I think there's a narrative that it has to be one of the other, right. That either the framers were pure of heart and concerned with, you know, just the dominance over small States and the elites as a buffer to the populace, or it was all driven by slavery.

 And I think what we have increasingly been able to acknowledge and I hope really adopt as an understanding when we talk about the history of our country, particularly the founding is that both things can be true and that the dominance of Southern States and the role of slavery in not just the Southern economy, but for the entire economy was ever present. 

There was no compartmentalize conversation for these men in which slavery was not a part of the equation, and this was no different. And when they were figuring out how to allocate electors and the congressional representatives, you had Northern States with far more eligible voters than Southern States, roughly 40% of the population in Southern States were enslaved people who obviously were not allowed to vote.

In Virginia alone, more than 60% of the population were enslaved people. So they knew that they knew that their numbers weren't going to be as high. They were worried about slavery and the continuation of slavery and the role it played in their economies. It's not like abolition was silent from any conversation before the founding of this country.

And so. What happens if you, as you see James Madison propose this truly horrific compromise in which enslaved people will be counted as three-fifths people for purposes of population in the Southern States were entitled to count those for their representation in Congress. And so what happens? Well, Virginia comes out like California of the founding era with 12 of the total 91 electoral votes at the time. 

And that's more than a quarter of the 46 they needed at the time to win and the electoral college. And so that's why you see for 32 of the constitution's first 36 years, a white slave holding Virginian winning the presidency because that compromise, established their dominance.

And, you know, put into our founding documents the belief that enslaved people were not citizens, were not fully human and continued that really horrific underpinning that slavery held in all these conversations, but particularly around the electoral college. 

Beth: [00:10:12] Sarah, I really liked that you spent a minute saying there's more than one thing going on here because in the writing about the electoral college that focuses on just the premise that may be a direct, popular vote isn't what we want. When I read the Federalist papers about the concerns about demagogues for example, I am convicted. I think that there are some really good thinking going on. And at the same time, all of that thinking was influenced by the present realities of how are people living day to day.

This is the founding version of it's the economy stupid. Right. And so I think it's really frustrating to see conversations unfold, where people accuse one, another of denying history. Either because of the minimization of the role that the institution of slavery played or the focus on that role there, it's just both. And you can't understand this well without understanding how slavery impacted the decisions that they made. 

There were a couple of other assumptions, just parts of the water as Sarah might say, for the founding fathers here. And one of those was the idea that political parties were just not on the radar as the kind of dominant institutions that they are now.

The founders assumed that people would exercise individual discretion. It is a significant shift from the formation of the electoral college. But national political parties now limit the number of presidential candidates. As we go through the history you'll see there were times when multiple candidates for the same party were getting tied up in the electoral college.

So winnowing the field by these two major parties has allowed for somebody to actually reach the majority of the electoral college, which isn't seemingly what the founders really intended. That virtually eliminates Congress's role. The house of representatives hasn't decided an election since 1824. So we have a very significant departure from those founding assumptions in the form of the dominance of the two major parties now. 

Sarah: [00:12:21] The focus on small States to me is so low down on their list. Not that it doesn't exist, but this, this emphasis on Congress, this emphasis on the counter, the electoral votes being counted individually, that they were probably thinking about a more district focused allocation of electors to me, shows you that they were really had a different vision for how this was going to play out. 

You know, all we talk about today is the dominance of the two party system. And so I'm not sure how we can look back to the founding where they didn't anticipate, or at least not all of them anticipated. And certainly didn't build into the system, the two party system, and then the, and then conclude, Oh, well, all of their, their assumptions and conclusions still apply.

 To me, that is, you know, it's ahistorical or it's trying to use history to answer questions that are no longer relevant to our day and time. And I mean, you see them shift on this, and this is the second thing we want you to understand, is you see the electoral college has persistently advantaged, less populous areas over more populous areas.

And you see in particular, their willingness to acknowledge the system was changing with the 12th amendment. And this really came about after the truly bananas election of 1800. So you have John Adams and Thomas Jefferson. John Adams loses the election. If you've watched Hamilton, this is all starting to fit sound wildly familiar, but it's not clear who won because the election and the electoral college did not separate President and vice-president. 

And so Jefferson and his running mate, Aaron Burr were tied with 73 votes a piece. And so that's where you see Hamilton trying to convince the Federalist, his party that really were dominant in the house, to throw the election to Jefferson. It took until February of 1801, but the house selected Jefferson over his running mate.

And that scenario would never reoccur because in 1804, we have the 12th amendment that splits the election of the president and the vice-president. 

Beth: [00:14:34] The one thing you Hamilton lovers should know is that Aaron Burr did serve that first full term as vice-president. In the show, you kind of get the impression that Jefferson immediately showed Burr the door.

He served a term, it took a while to get the 12th amendment done and we saw more problems in a, an even more bananas situation, arguably in 1824. So there were four serious contenders for president from the democratic Republicans, all from the same party. Although each of them had some local and regional popularity, none of them attained the majority of the party's electoral college votes. 

The person who had the most popular votes and the most electoral college votes was Andrew Jackson, but he only got 99. John Quincy Adams came in at 84, William Crawford with 41 and Henry Clay with 37. And so nobody had gotten to 131, which was at the time the majority needed. The election, went to the house of representatives. And under the 12th amendment, each state delegation cast one vote among the top three candidates. So Henry Clay who had that 37 total 

Sarah: [00:15:44] and a lot of time in relationships in the house of representatives under his 

Beth: [00:15:47] belt, came out of the running and struck a deal with John Adams to become his secretary of state in return for throwing congressional support towards Adams. So Andrew Jackson gets the most popular votes and the most electoral college votes initially, and still loses the presidency through what he later called the corrupt bargain between Clay and Adams.

And when Andrew Jackson tried this again and became the president in 1828 in 1828, his first address to Congress included the recommendation that we eliminate the electoral college. 

Sarah: [00:16:23] And listen, I like Andrew Jackson, I think he's a terrible president, but that is truly, you know, I don't like Andrew Jackson. I think he was a terrible president, but he's not wrong about that.

And you can sure as heck see if you, if you want both the popular vote and had the most votes in the electoral college and still weren't president, you'd be pretty mad at the institution as well. So the 18 hundreds, really, I think you see a lot of the problems with the electoral college play out. 

So I was really interested in the work of historian Alexander Keyssar, and he makes the point in his book Why Do We Still Have the Electoral College?, that what you also see that the 12th amendment and the historical anomaly of the 1824 election didn't change is the fact that the electoral college continued to disproportionally benefit Southern States. So in the period after the civil war, Southern States could count African-Americans in their population and benefit from that representation in Congress, you know, we'd gotten rid of the three-fifths compromise.

So they were counted as whole citizens. But what we know from that time continuing through the 1900s is that they could not vote. So they got the benefit of that representation, but not the input of those actual citizens in the democratic process. And there, the Southern States influence continue to grow and they continue to oppose the popular vote all the way through 1970, when we came really close to replacing the electoral college, there was a constitutional amendment to do so passed in the house in 1969, and then went to the Senate where the Southern senators ultimately blocked it through filibuster. The belief was that the electoral college helped the white South defend itself against Northern pressure to enlarge civil rights and voting rights. 

Beth: [00:18:04] This problem of certain populations being disproportionately benefited, by the way we allocate representation persist. And you've probably heard some of these numbers, those surprising one to me is when you compare Texas and Wyoming. You know where I live in Kentucky, people love to talk about California, but Texas is actually the most underrepresented state in the electoral college.

 One electoral vote in Wyoming, our least populous state represents 193,000 people. One electoral college vote in Texas represents 763,000 people. If the electoral college votes were distributed evenly across the country, one vote would represent 610,000 people. And when you start to dive into the demographics of people who are underrepresented, you see a lot of traces of that three-fifths compromise carrying forward.

 Asian Americans have barely more than half the voting power of white Americans, because they tend to live in safe blue States. We look at the census to get these representation numbers, and the census Bureau itself tells us that we consistently under count groups of people who are not white, including 2.1% of African-Americans in the 2010 census, 1.5% of Hispanic Americans and the marginalization of voters who are not white in many States is compounded by voter suppression laws and practices, which we've talked about elsewhere.

And so by pure numbers. And certainly as those numbers are applied, we're missing lots of people. One person, one vote doesn't survive the math of the electoral college. 

Sarah: [00:19:53] Yeah. I read recently that the margin of victory in the popular vote that president elect Biden has, which is between four and 5 million votes as we continue to count, is larger than the population of 23 States. I mean, I don't even think 610,000 people if they were, if it was all split up evenly, that's still problematic. You know, that's too many people for one electoral college vote. 

Beth: [00:20:24] Another good example of that is that we have 4 million people living in us territories that are not represented in the electoral college at all.

And that number of people living in the territories is roughly equal to the number of people living in our five least populous States combined. Wow. I thought that was shocking when I read it this morning.

Sarah: [00:20:57] So five candidates over the course of our country's history have lost the popular vote, but when the electoral college, Donald Trump, George W. Bush, Benjamin Harrison, Rutherford B. Hayes and John Quincy Adams. So let's talk about the process that plays out even when someone loses the popular vote, but wins the electoral college.

 Most of this process is determined by federal and state laws, not the constitution. 

Beth: [00:21:23] It's important to start with the premise that there is no right of the people to vote in presidential elections under the constitution. It simply does not exist. The constitution leaves everything to the electoral college and the electoral college, figuring out how that works in turn is left mostly in the hands of Congress and the States.

 The constitution assigns each state a number of electors equal to the combined total of your Senate representation. So every state gets two and your house delegation. So at present, cause that house delegation can change with the census, the number of electors per state ranges from three, which. See in the district of Columbia and Wyoming, two 55 for California for a total of 538. To be elected, you need a majority of 270 votes as we all well know. Right? 

Sarah: [00:22:17] Well, the problem is too that, that the apportionment under the house of representatives is also really broken. So you have to like this broken system baked into this other broken system. We frozen the number of house of representatives at 435. Even though we froze that in 1920, when our country was, Oh, I don't know, quite a bit smaller. And so you have representatives that they're estimating could have 1 million constituents in as little as 10 years.

 It's too many, you can't represent the needs, concerns and interest of 1 million people. And so these, these numbers and the way we're having to move around the same 435, even though States in our population continue to grow, you know, that's baked into the problematic representation of the electoral college.

So by statute, Congress has required States to appoint their electors on election day. So really what we're voting on on our ballots is our electors, not president. And then by statute electors assemble in their respective States on the Monday after the second Wednesday in December. 

And so they decided, well, we're not going to bring everybody together, that seems like a recipe for, for problems and maybe even disaster. So everybody does it in their own respective States. They are pledged and expect to vote for the candidates they represent. There are separate ballots are cast for president and vice president after which the electoral college ceases to exist for another four years.

And the electoral vote results are counted and certified by a joint session of Congress held on January 6th of the year, succeeding the election. 

Beth: [00:23:51] So just to be clear, when you talk about the power of state legislatures, theoretically, any state could decide in advance of an election to cancel the popular vote and just appoint electors.

The constitution would seemingly permit that. After election day by federal statute States have chosen their electors. There is only one exception to that, and that is if a state has failed to make a choice of electors on the day prescribed by law on election day, the electors may be appointed in a manner directed by the legislature.

This has never happened in all of American history. Congress has never expressly defined what constitutes election failure, but we know that delays in counting ballots or in resolving election disputes will not meet that standard. So if you are worried about this idea that state legislatures are going to go rogue multiple state legislatures, right?

Because this election doesn't hang on one state, there are numerous paths for Biden Harris to get to 270. So you would need multiple state legislatures deciding in a way that I think courts would find violative of at least federal statutes, if not the constitution to invalidate the results of their elections and pass a law, appointing a new slate of electors.

That just seems to me to be a very far fetched scenario. I've tried to read from numerous perspectives, whether it is possible that several state legislatures would just ignore the results of their elections, prevent the elections from being certified and appoint a new slate of electors and every single one of those experts that I've been able to find has said that is totally implausible.

And there are multiple ways under both federal law and the constitution that that would not survive in court. 

Sarah: [00:26:01] So most States prescribed one of the two methods. They, 34 States require that candidates for the office of the presidential elect or be nominated by the state party conventions while a further 10 than Nate nomination by the States party central committee.

So it's the parties picking these elector and then based on the popular vote, the winners parties elect or go to the college. The remaining States use a variety of methods, including nomination by the governor on recommendation of the party committees or the primary election or by the party's presidential nominee.

All but Nebraska and Maine is again, we're all probably well aware of by now operate on a winner, take all approach. And the electoral votes go to the winner of the popular vote, the state, regardless of the margin of victory. 

Beth: [00:26:40] The fourth thing we want you to know about this process is that state laws and Supreme court decisions have largely bound electors to their state's popular vote. So the framers told us in the Federalist papers that they had some sense that the electoral college meant something, that these people should be elite to exercise their own individual conscience in casting a vote for president, but that's not where we are today.

Individual electors have occasionally failed to honor their commitments voting for a different candidate or candidates than the ones they were pledged to. And we call those faithless electors or unfaithful electors but that hasn't happened very much. In our nation's history, 90 faithless votes have been cast.

The balance of opinion by constitutional scholars is that once electors have been chosen, they should remain constitutionally free agents. But we have state laws that have said, no, you are a pledged and you must vote for that person. Okay. 32 States and the district of Columbia have laws intended to prevent electors from going rogue and in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, and Wisconsin, failure to vote as pledge cancels the vote and replaces the elector.

 The U S Supreme court also just unanimously upheld laws that remove or punish rogue electors, um, for refusing to cast their votes as they were pledged. And I want you to know that that opinion was written by justice Elena Kagan about electors who failed to vote for Donald Trump. So the Supreme court did not operate just as like pure party politics in evaluating this decision.

They said the constitution leaves everything up to the States, so the States can pass the laws that they want. And there was a hint in her opinion of the court really expressing the view that people now in the United States expect that the people, the masses do elect the president and we should uphold that expectation.

The other thing to know about faithless electors is that only once in American history has a faithless elector voted for the opposing party's nominee. They're usually just trying to make a statement, not shift the outcome. So you saw in 2016, for example, people casting votes for Colin Powell. It's not like a Donald Trump elector becomes a Hillary Clinton elector, 

Sarah: [00:29:08] and it's also never changed the outcome of the election.

Beth: [00:29:11] Right.

Sarah: [00:29:19] The last thing we want you to know is that we have a long history of trying to improve this terribly broken system. There have been over 700 proposals, introduced into Congress to reform or eliminate the electoral college over the course of our country's history. One mechanism that gets a lot of play right now is that a number of States are entering into a national popular vote compact.

 Since 2008, 16 States and then the district of Columbia have passed laws to adapt the national popular vote interstate compact, which is a multi-state agreement that commits electors to vote for candidates who in the national popular vote, even if the candidate loses the popular vote within their state, but the compact doesn't go into effect until enough States have ratified it to reach an electoral majority of 270 votes.

So they're currently at 196, including small States, medium States, big States, but they need 74 more electoral votes in order to put the compact into effect and it's been introduced in all 50 States and you can go to their website and see where your state stands in the process. 

Beth: [00:30:20] A more permanent solution than this interstate compact would be an amendment to the constitution. There have been more amendments to the constitution to reform or eliminate the electoral college than have been introduced into Congress on any other topic, but it is very hard to amend the constitution in our system. And it would take significant consensus, at least two thirds affirmation from both the house and the Senate and approved from at least 38 of 50 States.

But Congress has nearly reached this threshold in the past, almost in 1934, as we mentioned earlier, we got close in the seventies. Other than just eliminating the electoral college, there are ideas about how to make this system more fair. I feel like we get stuck in the binary of, we either do it exactly the way we do it today, or it's a pure popular vote that miss some really good ideas out there.

Sarah: [00:31:17] So there's a proposal to redistribute the electors like Nebraska and Maine by district. So it would go proportional by population and award a certain number based on winning the popular vote in that district. And then go proportional from there. 

Beth: [00:31:31] You could also keep the current structure, but add a bonus number of electoral college votes for the winner of the national popular vote. So everything else stays the same. But the proposal that is most widely talked about is that you would give 102 votes to the winner of the national popular vote. And what that effectively does is cancel out the two electors each state gets because of the United States Senate. 

Sarah: [00:31:58] Um, and then of course there are proposals to abolish the electoral college and use ranked choice voting, um, which we've talked about quite a bit on the podcast before.

So it's not like there aren't proposals out there. And I don't think, and I think it's clear that there's a hunger to address the system and that people really see it as broken and problematic. And we will talk about all of these proposals and our thoughts on the electoral college more on Tuesday show.

Beth: [00:32:22] I hope that's spending time just talking through the mechanics can help everybody take a little bit of a breath because there is a frenzy of speculation online, and this is what we do when we have to wait for uncomfortable things to play out, that this system can be easily manipulated. It's not that it's full-proof, it certainly isn't.

We just spent half an hour telling you that we don't think it's a very good system. So there are problems here, but I really am not concerned that state legislatures are going to be able to hijack this process. I feel very comfortable knowing that election results are going to be certified. And the understanding that we have now that Joe Biden won the electoral college handily as well as the popular vote will stand.

Sarah: [00:33:09] Well, and I just want to say to everybody, you know, we, we keep getting messages. Will you talk about the four seasons total landscaping press conference? And I'll have to say is like, that's the same crew, the same crew that did the four seasons total landscaping press conference is the crew we're worried about staging a coup. It's the same people.

And so, you know, it's, it's a little disjointed to to laugh deservedly at that debacle and then feel so fearful that they'll be able to pull off the first coup in American history. Let me be clear. I also have some of that anxiety I'm not sitting in yet. I have not been Zen this week. I've had to look up a couple of times, like, no, wait, how would this work?

And I think that's always the, that's why I thought it was really helpful for us to go through. This is because sometimes the best bet is to be like, wait, how would that actually play out? And you know, you always have to remember, I think the press is always going to be really careful. Everyone feels really careful in 2020 to never say never because it's been a wacky year, so they're not going to say, Oh, this can't happen.

But. I hope that we've given you enough information and acknowledgment that that would be extraordinarily rare 

Beth: [00:34:18] And it would be historically unprecedented. We have no precedent for that kind of dramatic overturn of the will of the people as expressed through the vote. The lawsuits are going to play out. They're going to identify perhaps a handful of incidents of improper voting, but.

A handful of incidents of improper voting are part of every election. Again, it's a handful. It's tiny because we do a pretty good job having elections here in the United States. And so we're excited to continue to talk about how we might even do a better job having elections in the United States next time. But we hope we can give you a deep breath here.  

Sarah: [00:34:57] So thanks for joining us for another episode of Pantsuit Politics! We will be back in your ears on Tuesday and until then, keep it nuanced, y'all.

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